Text: Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe at World AIDS Day Mass + Video

Timothy Radcliffe with CAPS team members at the reception at the London Jesuit Centre after Mass

Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe OP gave the following homily at the World AIDS Mass at Farm Street Church on Saturday, 6 December 2025.

In the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the crew of a spacecraft orbiting the earth see our little planetary home with new eyes. One of them said: 'You'll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you'll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for.'

In sunlight there are no boundaries but in the dark, lights show frontiers, walls, division.

Exhilaration, rapture, tenderness and hope, because we are all intimately linked with each other and with all of creation. We are just beginning to discover the dazzling interconnection of everything, from the tiny threads of mycelium which bind together our woods, sharing nourishment and healing between trees to the rolling oceans.

But also depression, anger and despair, because we are divided by war, prejudice, intolerance and the massive inequalities of wealth. These are denials of who we are.

Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk, wrote, 'We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.'

In today's gospel Jesus proclaims the coming of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is the triumph of love over hate and communion over isolation. It is entry into the infinite joy of God who is, as Bob Marley sang, One Love.

AIDS shines a bright light on how we are one and how this is denied. Jesus sends out his disciples to gather us into this union of heart and soul. He said 'the harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few.' He told us to pray for labourers to be sent into the harvest, and our prayers have been answered.

The response to AIDS showed that there are more labourers gathering in the harvest than many of us had imagined. The LGBT community shows an astounding compassion and love for those who suffered and were exhausted. Many of us did not know that we were blessed with these courageous fellow labourers. They endure year after year, resilient in their compassion.

Think of the parents and siblings and partners and carers who laboured with love.

Think of the nurses and doctors.

Think also of the scientists and researchers who patiently go on searching for new medication to ease people's sufferings and extend their lives. These too are labourers in the harvest of the Kingdom. Yes, the labourers are few compared with the suffering of humanity, but AIDS showed us that they are vastly more than many imagined.

Jesus calls us all to gather in the harvest. 'Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay.' Think of the millions who give without receiving any payment, of so many voluntary organisations reaching out in love, Positive faith, CAPS and so many others. All symbolised by the AIDS quilt panels, sown together.

But AIDS also shows how our unity is denied, betrayed. The slashing of funding to aids programmes by so many governments means that HIV+ infections are rising again in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions more people are likely to be infected and die as a direct result of the reduction of aid.

We are one, inescapably part of each other. We are like that little crew in the spacecraft. One of them said: 'Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. We can't be divided, this is the truth. We won't be because we can't be. We breathe each other's recycled air. We drink each other's recycled urine." Well, I hope something else will be offered at the reception!

Everyone of us is called to live in the truth of our mutuality and, and gather in the harvest of the Kingdom. A hundred times a day we choose the truth of our life together or the deathly illusion of disconnection, the sunlight or the darkness.

Watch Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe at World AIDS Mass: https://youtu.be/WYknwFwdxA4?si=snVp9pFa_AdiDAKq

Read our earlier report: Mass marks global impact of HIV and AIDS: www.indcatholicnews.com/news/53869

See more pictures on ICN's Facebook page: HERE